This is a photo and metadata backup utility for Flickr
written as a self-contained Java command line tool. The
metadata is written is an XML file whose format is an aggregation of
the response data from the Flickr API.

Flickr doesn’t provide feeds
for private groups. It doesn’t provide feeds for comments on photos
in a group, either. It is reasonable to want such feeds, so here’s
a script that generates them on your HTTP server.

I think that experience from Namespaces in XML should lead to the conclusion not to repeat the same (or almost same) thing with JSON. I think the developer community as a whole should not pay the cost of the use cases of the part of the developer community that believes (out of the scope of this post if rightly or wrongly) that identifiers in data formats should fit into a global naming scheme and, more specifically, that naming scheme should make every identifier into a URI. Instead, I think that the part of the developer community that believes that it needs to be able merge data thanks to identifiers being URIs should bear the cost of doing whatever name mangling it needs to do upon data ingest given the information of which format a given ingested piece of JSON was in.

This post is about a UI feature that I wish no one would have to use. Happily, it is indeed almost unused. Still, I made it more usable in the case when it is used. (The change was more driven by code removal than usability, though.)

Since I’ve participated in the development of HTML5 for a decade now (since before it was commonly called “HTML5”), I’ve been asked for my thoughts about HTML5 becoming a W3C Recommendation. Hence, I figured I’d post something here.

A person who turns to me for technical advice was logging in to government service using banking for a bank called Handelsbanken. However, the page that was asking for the Handelsbanken login credentials was not served from https://*.handelsbanken.fi/! After investigating what was going on, I decided to review how other banks in Finland handle this. Here are my findings.

It was suggested at the Mozilla Summit that there isn’t good information around about what Encrypted Media Extensions (EME) actually is. Since I’m on the HTML working group and have been reading the email threads about EME there, I thought that I could provide an introduction that explains things that may not be apparent from the specification itself.

I have been reading tweets and blog posts expressing various
levels of disappointment and unhappiness about schema.org not using
RDFa, not using Microformats or not having been developed in the open
with the community. Since other people’s perspectives differ from
mine, I feel compelled to write
down my take.

about:blank
is probably the hardest Web page to load. In fact, it is so hard that
in order to turn the HTML5 parser on by default in Firefox last year,
we decided to special-case about:blank
to use the old parser in Firefox 4.

Vihreät julkaisivat äskettäin tekijänoikeuslinjapaperin.
On positiivista, että puolue kiinnittää huomiota aihepiiriin niin
paljon, että siitä julkaistaan erillinen linjapaperi. Minua
kuitenkin häiritsee paperissa suhtautuminen teosten tekijöiden
eläketurvaan. (English summary: I’m unhappy that the newly
released copyright policy paper of the Finnish Green Party suggests
that authors of copyrighted works should get royalties for the
commercial use of the works they have created long after the creation
of the work in order to get money in the pensioner age.)

In Firefox 4 beta 7, script execution changed to be more
HTML5-compliant than before. This means that in some cases sites that
sniff for Firefox or Gecko may break. If your site/app works
cross-browser without browser sniffing, you don’t need to read
further. (However, if you triage bugs on bugzilla.mozilla.org, you might still want to read on.)

Apple took some of their Safari Technology Demos from their
developer site and published them at http://www.apple.com/html5/
as an “HTML5 Showcase”. Christopher
Blizzard's blog post about the subject says almost everything I'd
have to say, so please read Blizzard's post. I'm posting just my
diffs here.

As mentionedearlier, there is an ongoing project for replacing Gecko’s old HTML parser with an HTML5 parser. Significant improvements have landed lately, so if you’ve previously tried the HTML5 parser and turned it off due to crashiness or Web compatibility issues, now is a good time to turn it back on.

The HTML5 parsing algorithm is meant to demystify HTML parsing and
make it uniform across implementations in a backwards-compatible way.
The algorithm has had “in the lab” testing, but so far it hasn’t
been tested inside a browser by a large number of people. You
can help change that now!

Many of the comments on Zeldman’s
post indicate that there are people who are badly misinformed about
the matters surrounding this announcement. To help remedy that,
here’s some quick Q&A for getting informed.

I’ve been thinking about the performance gap between the
Validator.nu HTML Parser and Xerces. What can be attributed to the
“extra fix-ups” that an HTML parser has to do and what can be
attributed to my code being worse than the Xerces code?

Last weekend, Slashdot linked
to an article
that observed that Netscape had removed the RSS
0.91 DTD. I hope this episode has a silver
lining and helps in making people realize that DTDs don’t belong on
the Web.

Charmod Norm is
still in the Working Draft state, but if it were to become a
normative part of (X)HTML5, it would belong to the area of the
conformance checking service that I am working on now, so I
prototyped Charmod Norm enforcement as well.

I have a lot of photos that aren’t shared properly, which makes
them less useful than they could be. Considering that it has been
possible to publish photos on the Web for over a decade, I find it
interesting and annoying how many unsolved problems there still are.

Atom (formerly known as Pie, Echo and Necho) has been created as a cleaner and better-defined alternative to RSS 2.0, which is underspecified. But is a reformulated version of RSS 2.0 really what we need?

Articles in Need of Updating

This document is a rough yes/no feature comparison of the Web browsers that run natively on Mac OS X. It does not cover browsers that run on the Classic VM or require an implementation of the X11 windowing system. Severely out of date. For historical reference only!

The Mozilla Editor is designed around HTML 4 Transitional. If special steps aren’t taken, it is easy to produce presentational documents that lack stylable structure. This document describes some basic good authoring practices for the purpose of writing structural and stylable documents.

A document about points being often mistakenly though as pixel units. Points are not pixel units. Defining the font size in points on Web pages is considered harmful. This document needs to be updated.